Here Ramadan is quite difficult for Muslims this year... I just checked ... breaking the fast is at 9:20 today and the fast resumes at 2:41 in the morning. This means there are only about 5 hours 20 minutes in which to eat. Sleeping is even more restricted, as there is one more "prayer" around 10:30 or so.

If you are working, not only eating patterns but also sleeping patterns will be severely disrupted, which for some people can be quite dangerous, for example diabetics, or anyone who needs medication at fixed times. It certainly cannot be healthy.

I know all the standard answers Muslims give, so no need to tell me about those. I also know none of this affects you are you live in a tropical country with regular sunrise and sunset throughout the year.

I wonder if you could tell me this though: Do the fasting rules in Islam not strongly suggest that whoever laid them down had no idea about how latitude affects length of the day? Or was it Mohammed's way of telling Muslims to stick around the equator?

What if Mohammed had been the proud owner of a wrist watch, like me.... Do you think he would have made different rules?

Prayer and Fasting during the long summer days in some Western countries

The Dar al-Iftā al-Misriyyah (Egyptian Centre for Religious Verdict) has issued the following religious verdict:

It is permitted for Muslims in Norway and others with similar situation to fast to the length of fasting in Makkah or Madīnah during long days and short nights or they can adopt the timing of the closest city with moderate (days and nights) and start their fast from dawn and break it in accordance to the hours (of fasting) of the city that was taken as the reference and do not need to wait till sunset.

I have my own way of fasting? Very simple...

Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with thee unless thou follow their form of religion.Say: "The Guidance of Allah,-that is the (only) Guidance."(2:120)

SAM, that was the stock answer, something both you and I know anyway. In reality, Muslims even in Glasgow, where the window for eating and sleeping is yet another hours or so shorter in the summer, very few Muslims would rely on fatwas. Why not?

Because the Qur'an and Mohammed were silent on that question. If fasting is "prescribed" by Allah, no less, why would he need help from some Egyptian clerics?

My question was not for the stock answer, but this: why cannot fasting be regulated simply using the time by ALL Muslims? And why should it matter that all do the exact same thing? The answer to that is because Mohammed did not have a watch. And because of that simple thing, like every year, there will be some 50 to 100 Muslims who die during Ramadan in the UK.

In Judaism there is only one fasting day. In Christianity there are 40, but it is up to the individual how to use them, and you should not even tell anyone what you have decided.

manfred wrote:SAM, that was the stock answer, something both you and I know anyway. In reality, Muslims even in Glasgow, where the window for eating and sleeping is yet another hours or so shorter in the summer, very few Muslims would rely on fatwas. Why not?

Depending on the individual according to their beliefs.

Because the Qur'an and Mohammed were silent on that question. If fasting is "prescribed" by Allah, no less, why would he need help from some Egyptian clerics?

Fatwa ...a ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognized authority.

My question was not for the stock answer, but this: why cannot fasting be regulated simply using the time by ALL Muslims? And why should it matter that all do the exact same thing? The answer to that is because Mohammed did not have a watch. And because of that simple thing, like every year, there will be some 50 to 100 Muslims who die during Ramadan in the UK.

Muslims already practice fasting since 1400 years ago, is nothing new about it. None of thousands or millions of Muslims who have died because of fasting.

In Judaism there is only one fasting day. In Christianity there are 40, but it is up to the individual how to use them, and you should not even tell anyone what you have decided.

That's none of my (Muslims) business..

Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with thee unless thou follow their form of religion.Say: "The Guidance of Allah,-that is the (only) Guidance."(2:120)

So when people drop dead from heatstroke and dehydration during Ramadan, what caused that, do you think? If it is nothing to do with fasting, why did the clerics say to stop fasting?

BTW, it is only a week, and in our little country so far we had 8 deaths caused by Ramadan practices, all women.

In Iraq, there were 49 people dead so far, not counting those who were murdered by other Muslims.

That may not sound like much to you. To me one dead over this is one too many.

As other have shown, the Ramadan ritual does little to make Muslims calm and peaceful, in fact every single year violence increases in that period.

It happened last year Thursday 2 July 2015...

At the same time it also happens in India(Non-Muslims) they were not fasting also died.. "The deaths come a month after neighbouring India suffered a deadly heatwave, with more than 2,000 deaths. Hundreds of mainly poor people die at the height of summer every year in India, but this year’s toll was the second highest in the country’s history."

They died because of the heatwave. Did you ever go the Middle East or North Africa ... the weather there is more heatwave than Pakistan...

Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with thee unless thou follow their form of religion.Say: "The Guidance of Allah,-that is the (only) Guidance."(2:120)

They died because of the heatwave. Did you ever go the Middle East or North Africa ... the weather there is more heatwave than Pakistan...

The heat in the Middle East is quite different from Pakistan (or even Singapore)... it is a dry heat, which does not feel as oppressive, but it is as dangerous as elsewhere.

If you walk around in a very hot place and do not drink enough water, you quite easily get a heat stroke. You blame the "heatwave", but we both know it is the lack of water that causes it. If you expose yourself to tropical heat for hours at a time and don't drink water you get sick.

While the wealthy Arabs have a choice to stay home and sleep, or to wander round air conditioned shopping malls, most Pakistanis are not that lucky. They need to work to eat. So the combination of fasting, specially not drinking, heat and physical activity is a recipe for problems, as even the local clerics have said. Sure, it is possible to get a heatstroke without the fasting, but the fasting makes it many times more likely.

Another common thing you may be familiar with is this: Malaysian/Indonesian people have an unusually high propensity to suffer from gout. This is caused by uric acid build up in the blood. If you eat a lot of fried food and drink little and irregularly, this will make uric acid levels rise, and with it come extremely painful gout attacks. The worst offender, btw, are cassava crackers, which really raise uric acid levels dramatically.

In Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, gout problems more than double during Ramadan. Why, people don't drink enough, spaced out during the day, and at night they eat tons of rich meat and fish dishes, mostly fried. I always tell my Indonesian Muslim friends to eat things like Soto Ayam, sayur assem or other "stocky" dishes, white rice, not fried, and agar agar, not cake. One old lady, after me nagging for three years, tried it with her husband and was most surprised it was making her feel much better, and no gout attack for the first time in years.

You can always pretend there is some other cause, but often it stares you in the face. In Arab countries there is a marked rise in deathly motor accidents in Ramadan. When people don't eat properly and disrupt their sleep patterns, they loose reaction time and alertness. Do you drive SAM? Maybe in Ramadan you better take the subway...

SAM wrote:I have ever been to Tunisia, Morocco, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt a long time ago. I believe you know nothing about weather there.

Well you believe whatever you like. I know Morocco very well, and it is not as extreme as the Arab countries. Egypt is actually very pleasant except for July and August.

Heat waves happen anywhere..

The 2003 heat wave in Europe killed about 80,000 people.... Did they die because of fasting.

SAM, this a the classic was of refusing to process inconvenient information. ANY doctor, and any person with an ounce of common sense will tell you if you are in a hot place and you do not drink when needed and still remain very active, you are asking for trouble.

Of course you can get a heatstroke without fasting, but fasting makes the occurrence much more likely.

Similarly the disruption of sleep patterns and general weakness leads to poor concentration, making traffic accidents more likely, and work much slower and more inefficient. It also affects moods, and that is why instances of violence against non-Muslims rise sharply during Ramadan, as do issues around domestic violence.

All these you can pretend to have some other causes, to any rational person the fasting patterns are certainly a decisive issue. Last year even the Pakistani clerics said so, in unison.

When all is said and done, Ramadan is just a continuation of pre Islamic pagan ritual, which Mohammed took and encompassed into his invention he called Islam.

All Muslims are doing are copying the actions of Mohammed their leader, who used everything familiar to him,including his "greatest"pagan idol Allah, and made it look like it came from the God of the Bible,giving it all a religious veneer.

The roots of Ramadan are pagan,it does not originate from the Bible God, who does not advocate veneration of stones, which is a totally pagan based notion.

Two different medical people have told me of people getting dehydrated in the recent English warm spell in May. Imagine if they hadn't been drinking at all all day.Perhaps Allah has chosen to make the nights shorter in Northern latitudes to compensate for the cooler climate, so as to even out the punishment handed down to the failthful across the globe?As for Mohammed, he may not have had a watch, but he certainly had access to a calendar that put months at more or less the same time each year. It must have been on the orders of his moon god that he adopted a calendar that produced not so much a movable feast as a movable fast.

‘Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

A Danish minister known for her strong anti-immigration views on Monday May 21st called for Muslims to take time off work during the fasting period of Ramadan, saying the practice is "dangerous for all of us".

The comments from immigration and integration minister Inger Stojberg, a member of the centre-right Liberal Party, come after Ramadan, one of Islam's most revered holidays in which Muslims around the world fast from dawn until dawn, began last week.

"I want to call on Muslims to take leave from work during the month of Ramadan to avoid negative consequences for the rest of Danish society," Stojberg wrote in a column for the BT tabloid.

"I wonder if a religious order commanding observance to a 1,400-year-old pillar of Islam is compatible with the society and labour market that we have in Denmark in 2018."

She also said she feared the fasting could affect "safety and productivity," giving as an example bus drivers who have "neither had a drink nor eaten for more than 10 hours".

"This can be dangerous for all of us," she said.

Stojberg previously stoked controversy last year when she posted to Facebook a photo of her smiling and holding a cake to celebrate Denmark's 50th measure for toughening immigration laws.

One of the strongest measures came into force in 2016, allowing police to seize valuables from refugees, although the government's guidelines exempted wedding and engagement rings after critics likened the plans to the confiscation of gold from Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

Over the last 15 years, the country has tightened its immigration policies, insisting that migrants must learn the country's customs and language in order to adapt to the labour market.

Parents of Muslim pupils in Germany have complained that their children should not have to take part in any exams due to the stress placed on them by fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

President of the German Teachers’ Association Heinz-Peter Meidinger has complained that Ramadan fasting has caused several problems with Muslim parents including many being “exhausted” due to fasting, Kronen Zeitung reports.

The issues have affected many schools in Berlin because of the high numbers of migrant-background students with Meidinger claiming that parents have specifically requested that their children not be made to take any sort of examination during the Islamic holy month.

“A lot of students take the fast very seriously now,” Meidinger said.

Family Minister Franziska Giffey, of the Social Democrats, said that fasting should not be a focus for children saying: “Children have to drink and eat regularly, otherwise they can no longer follow lessons attentively.”

Giffey added that teachers and others should also make sure classmates were not using peer pressure against Muslim students who were fasting saying: “There should be no discrimination, no matter if someone is fasting or not.”

The demands are not the first time Islamic religious practises has interfered with schooling in a European country. Last year, a Dutch school in the Hague held a class photo day during the Eid al-Adha and two Muslim sisters were unable to take part in the photograph.

After complaints were lodged by the mother of the two young girls, the school was forced to pay out 500 euros to each girl after a discrimination lawsuit was filed. The parents had demanded 10,000 euros, initially.

Ramadan has become much more well-known and practised in Germany since the 2015 migrant crisis with German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk Kultur claiming that the Islamic holy month is an “old German custom”.

Manama: Saudi Arabia’s education minister has dismissed rumours that the end-of-year exams would be brought forward so that students sit for them before the start of the fasting month of Ramadan.“Ramadan is a month of piety and charity, but it is like all the other months in terms of education, and students should get used to studying and sitting for exams in all circumstances and conditions,” Ahmad Al Eisa said. “If we try to hold the exams earlier this year, then what should we do next year and the subsequent years when Ramadan is in the middle of the school year? Our students have to adapt.”

‘Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah